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Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

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Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#171

Post by boredtofears »

shmerl wrote: post #156
lordnacho wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace their printf() debug habits, let alone AI tooling... When I was new to the business, I used interactive debugging a lot. The more experienced I got, the less I used it. printf() is surprisingly useful, especially if you upgrade it a little bit to a log-level aware framework. Then you can leave your de…

I kind of had the opposite experience. I used to rely mostly on printfs and etc. but started using debugger more. printf doesn't improve going up and down the call stacks in the debugger to analyze their chain (you'd have to spam debug printfs all around you expect this chain to happen to replace the debugger which would waste time). debugger is really powerful if you use it more than superficially.

> you'd have to spam debug printfs all around you expect this chain to happen to replace the debugger which would waste time

It's not wasting time, it's narrowing in on the things you know you need to look for and hiding everything else. With a debugger you have to do this step mentally every time you look at the debugger output.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#172

Post by JustExAWS »

Been in the industry professionally since 1996 writing code and before that 10 years as a hobbyist between a little BASIC, C and a lot of assembly (65C02, 68k, PPC and x86).

In the last 6 months, when I have had an assignment that involved coding, AI has generated 100% of my code. I just described the abstractions I wanted and reusable modules/classes I needed and built on it.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#174

Post by RugnirViking »

rblatz wrote: post #124
verdverm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw, VS Code has a snooze auto complete button. Each press is 5m, a decently designed feature imo

Copilot replacing intellisense is a huge shame. Why get actual auto complete when you can get completely hallucinated methods and properties instead.

Does it actually replace it? I can still get intellisense style suggestions on my ides (various jetbrains and visual studio) and it's still just as useful (what can this object do I wonder...)

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#175

Post by shmerl »

boredtofears wrote: post #171
shmerl wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of had the opposite experience. I used to rely mostly on printfs and etc. but started using debugger more. printf doesn't improve going up and down the call stacks in the debugger to analyze their chain (you'd have to spam debug printfs all around you expect this chain to happen to replace the debugger which would waste time). debugger is really powerful if you use it more than superficially.

> you'd have to spam debug printfs all around you expect this chain to happen to replace the debugger which would waste time It's not wasting time, it's narrowing in on the things you know you need to look for and hiding everything else. With a debugger you have to do this step mentally every time you look at the debugger output.

Trying to guess what that chain is and putting printf's all around that path feels like doing a poor simulation of what debugger can do out of the box and unlike us - precisely. So I'd say it's exactly the opposite.

If you only care about some specific spot, then sure - printf is enough, but you also need to recompile things every time you add a new one or change debug related details, while debugger can do it re-running things without recompilation. So if anything, printf method can take more time.

Also, in debugger you can reproduce printf using REPL.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#176

Post by JustExAWS »

ambicapter wrote: post #159
danielvaughn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m still not more productive. Maybe 10% more. But it alleviates a lot of mental energy, which is very nice at the age of 40.

Is the alleviating of the mental energy going to make you a worst programmer in the long run? Is this like skipping mental workouts that were ultimately keeping you sharp?

At 51, no one hires me because of my coding ability. They hire me because I know how to talk to the “business” and lead (larger projects) or implement (smaller projects) and to help sales close deals.

Don’t get me wrong, I care very deeply about the organization and maintainability of my code and I don’t use “agents”. I carefully build my code (and my infrastructure as code based architecture) piece by piece through prompting.

And I do have enough paranoia about losing my coding ability - and I have lost some because of LLMs - that I keep a year in savings to have time to practice coding for three months while looking for a job.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#177

Post by JustExAWS »

cbanek wrote: post #77
lordnacho wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile many of the seniors around me are stuck in their ways, refusing to adopt interactive debuggers to replace their printf() debug habits, let alone AI tooling... When I was new to the business, I used interactive debugging a lot. The more experienced I got, the less I used it. printf() is surprisingly useful, especially if you upgrade it a little bit to a log-level aware framework. Then you can leave your de…

This is absolutely true. If anything, interactive debuggers are a crutch and actual logging is the real way of debugging. You really can't debug all sorts of things in an interactive debugger, things like timing issues, thread problems, and you certainly can't find the actual hard bugs that are in running services in production, you know, where the bugs actually happen and are found. Or on other people's machines tha…

Really? I’ve been using interactive debuggers since the days of Turbo C/Turbo Pascal in the mid 1990s.

Yes you need good logging also.

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#178

Post by blackqueeriroh »

globnomulous wrote: post #13
daft_pink wrote: post #3

Developers are lazy. Anything that makes development faster or easier is going to be welcomed by a good developer. If you find it is quicker not to use it then you might hate it, but I think it is probably better in some cases and worse in other cases.

> Anything that makes development faster or easier is going to be welcomed by a good developer. I strongly disagree. Struggling with a problem creates expertise. Struggle is slow, and it's hard. Good developers welcome it.

> Struggling with a problem creates expertise. Struggle is slow, and it's hard. Good developers welcome it.

There is significant evidence that shows mixed results for struggle-based learning - it’s highly individualized and has to be calibrated carefully: https://consensus.app/search/challenge-based-learning-outcom...

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#179

Post by scarface_74 »

oblio wrote: post #139
unconed wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old fogeys don't rely on printf because they can't use a debugger, but because a debugger stops the entire program and requires you to go step by step. Printf gives you an entire trace or log you can glance at, giving you a bird's eye view of entire processes.

Most decent debuggers have condițional breakpoints.

And have since the mid 1990s at least…

Re: Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated

#180

Post by weego »

ambicapter wrote: post #159
danielvaughn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m still not more productive. Maybe 10% more. But it alleviates a lot of mental energy, which is very nice at the age of 40.

Is the alleviating of the mental energy going to make you a worst programmer in the long run? Is this like skipping mental workouts that were ultimately keeping you sharp?

Also in my 40s and above senior level. Theres not many mental workouts in day to day coding because the world is just not a new challenge every day. What I consider 'boilerplate' just expands to include things I've written a dozen times before in a different context. AI can write that to my taste and I can tackle the few actual challenges.
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